This patent disclosure provides various verification techniques to ensure that anonymized surgical procedure videos are indeed free of any personally-identifiable information (PII). In a particular aspect, a process for verifying that an anonymized surgical procedure video is free of PII is disclosed. This process can begin by receiving a surgical video corresponding to a surgery. The process next removes personally-identifiable information (PII) from the surgical video to generate an anonymized surgical video. Next, the process selects a set of verification video segments from the anonymized surgical procedure video. The process subsequently determines whether each segment in the set of verification video segments is free of PII. If so, the process replaces the surgical video with the anonymized surgical video for storage. If not, the process performs additional PII removal steps on the anonymized surgical video to generate an updated anonymized surgical procedure video.
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4. The computer-implemented method of claim 3, wherein identifying the subset of the set of predefined surgical phases statistically-known to contain PII comprises identifying one or more surgical phases among the set of predefined surgical phases which have higher probabilities to contain one or more out-of-body (OOB) events, wherein an OOB event corresponds to a time period when an endoscope is outside of a patient's body during the surgical procedure.
6. The method of claim 1, wherein selecting the set of verification video segments from the anonymized surgical video comprises performing a fully-random sampling by randomly-selecting the set of verification video segments throughout the anonymized surgical video.
7. The method of claim 1, wherein performing additional PII removal steps on the anonymized surgical video comprises performing a manual PII removal procedure on each segment within the set of verification video segments determined to still contain PII.
8. The method of claim 1, wherein after performing additional PII removal steps on the anonymized surgical video, the method further comprises randomly-sampling another set of verification video segments in the updated anonymized surgical video for additional verification.
14. The apparatus of claim 13, wherein the memory further stores instructions that, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the apparatus to identify the subset of the set of predefined surgical phases statistically-known to contain PII by identifying one or more surgical phases among the set of predefined surgical phases which have higher probabilities to contain one or more out-of-body (OOB) events, wherein an OOB event corresponds to a time period when an endoscope is outside of a patient's body during the surgical procedure.
15. The apparatus of claim 11, wherein the memory further stores instructions that, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the apparatus to select the set of verification video segments from the anonymized surgical video by randomly-selecting the set of verification video segments throughout the anonymized surgical video.
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July 20, 2021
June 27, 2023
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